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Jay Eales interviewed

“A dollar!” the boy protested, his voice higher and more quavering than he would have liked. “You know I ain’t got no dollar! What’ll you take for swaps?”

“Gee… I don’t know, Jackie. I’d have to think about it. I don’t know if I could let it go.”

“Let me put it on again. Go on, I won’t bash it none!”

“Okay, but don’t get your paws all over the goggles again.”

Writing is a notoriously solitary business. What keeps you at it? The fame that constantly eludes you? Getting a lie in mornings? The rubber?

Exorcism. It’s the only way to get out the pesky devils walking around in my head.

What was it that inspired “The Revenant”?

Two fingers of Lamont Cranston and a measure of Jim “The Spectre” Corrigan, served in a cone made from the newspaper cartoon section.

There seems to have been a shift in appreciation of Pulp Fiction. There is the so called New Pulp, but did Old Pulp ever really go away?

To paraphrase an old Alan Moore song, just like Old Gangsters, Old Pulps Never Die.

What sort of fiction do you prefer to read? Which are your favourite TV shows and movies?

It varies as the mood strikes me. I’m on a bit of a spy kick at the moment, but I lean towards horror, urban fantasy and crime for the most part, whether that’s in prose or comics. Favourite TV shows that immediately come to mind: Sapphire & Steel, Spaced, Monkey, Afterlife, Ultraviolet, A Very Peculiar Practice, Callan, The Sandbaggers, Ripping Yarns, Robin of Sherwood, True Detective, Homicide: Life on the Street, Breaking Bad.

Nothing signed and sealed, but I’ve got a couple of graphic novel proposals in the works (one of which is the first time that Selina Lock and I have collaborated) and the much neglected novel that keeps telling me that 2014 is the year to get my hands dirty. I’m also putting together the next publication from my publishing imprint Factor Fiction: A collection of comics from legendary small press comics autobiographer Lee Kennedy, a mainstay of our Girly Comic anthologies. I’ve spent several weeks scanning and restoring as many of her fab strips as I can lay my hands on, in preparation for the first of possibly several volumes.

Tell us something about yourself no one knows (don’t worry – no one is ever going to read this).

Somewhere in my house is a piece of Hitler memorabilia from one of his other bunkers. No, not the bunker you’re immediately thinking of. One of the other bunkers.